It is hilarious. These unceasing BJP victories mean the Indian mainstream media is forced to interpret damning defeats for the Congress Party as “a great opportunity” for the boy Rahul. And this despite the latest figures that demonstrate Modi’s governance is heartily approved of by the Indian population—which must therefore increasingly be seen as “a bunch of deplorables” by the sophisticates in Delhi to keep their hallucination intact.

I’ve been muchly struck by the similarities in the treatment of Modi, and now Donald Trump, in their respective countries during and after their election campaigns and victories. It’s been enlightening to observe Donald Trump being trashed by the limousine liberals (and even much of the Republican Party) in exactly the same way that previously Modi received abuse and brickbats in India from the Congress Party and its media sycophants (and a lot of the establishment BJP too) before and after he was elected PM.

Both leaders were initially condemned for being “Hitler” (who else?). Modi was to unleash a genocide against Indian Muslims the day after he became Prime Minister, before plunging the subcontinent into a fascist Hindutva dark age. Likewise Hitler Trump was going to deport eight million foreigners from the USA before shooting all the black population and installing the Ku Klux Klan in the State Department.

When these original hallucinations died they were replaced by the second hallucination (I am indebted here to Scott Adams’s insights, which I recommend to everybody either via his website or his almost-daily Periscope broadcasts). This second hallucination implicitly admitted that while neither Modi nor Trump was exactly Hitler, they were instead chaotic and hopeless, and their countries accordingly still doomed.

This story had clung to Modi for some time. He was narrated by the media as an “uneducated” son of a chai-wallah who would be lost in shepherding a nation, despite his two degrees in political science and a stellar decade-plus governing Gujarat. Likewise billionaire Trump was dismissed as a reality TV clown who had taken daddy’s money (one meellion dollars!) and once been bankrupted (administratively, like almost every other big US corporation).

Does anybody recall how the limousine liberals cried that Ronald Reagan would of course be useless because he was only an “actor” (despite already being two-terms gov of California)?

In fact, like Modi, Trump was tough and super-competent (he didn’t tolerate fools, especially ones on the public payroll), and very threatening to entrenched privilege, as has been proven in both cases. By now Modi and Trump have both got a lot done—exactly according to what they said they would do, not according to what their political enemies, still moaning, would like for them to have done.

And this has led to the third stage of the hallucination, in which reality at last begins to creep in. This third stage, in the case of both Modi and Trump, says, “Well then, he might be effective and get things done, but I don’t like it”. Which is fair enough, and tough luck, too, because lots of people do like it. In India they like it very much.

One example of what Modi has accomplished is the much (Congress)-maligned and -obstructed Goods and Services Tax (GST), a nation-wide levy imposed last July to replace and rationalise the complicated, inefficient and legendarily corrupt system of inter- and intra-state charges that kept India’s economy from growing. It was predicted, by me amongst others, that GST on its own would add at least 1% to GDP over time. Now we are starting to see some of the effects. In trucking and transport, for example, where it was expected to have a large net positive effect, GST can be somewhat quantified:

The average daily distance covered by a truck in India has gone up almost 25% in a matter of months since the advent of GST, from 300-350 to 400-450 kilometers per day.

Previous checkpoints for imposts (and bribes) entailed average five-hour waits before truck journeys could continue. All over India, trucks were parked up in an endless queue to be robbed. Now the stops have gone and the harassment from tax officials has vanished. The truck-stop hookers might moan, but then again, business might be a lot brisker, too.

Fewer, briefer stoppages have slashed maintenance costs for vehicles by up to 30%, claim transport firms. They also say that because the journeys are steadier and less interrupted, fuel consumption has improved by 10-15%.

So, conservatively, we could say that trucking has benefited by 15% overall in the last six months, and that’s taking into account the inevitable administrative difficulties of imposing a new system. What’s that going to look like going forward, and across all the businesses of India that will benefit in their own different ways?

Now Modi’s approval ratings start to make real sense, despite the way the Indian media desperately spins it. In fact, “Indians are still hopelessly in love with Narendra Modi” . Indeed, a new Pew Report out of Washington, DC, is astonished that Modi’s approval rating is stuck at a miserable 90%. Apparently even the Indian media is being forced to admit the economy is “returning to normal” (“Is Indian economy on the mend after demonetization shock?” after the “disaster” of demonetization—and you can see here and elsewhere what I think about that particular limousine-liberal hallucination.

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I am Andy Marino, biographer of Narendra Modi, and this site is designed to explain Indian economics and finance, government and politics, culture and history to Western investors, businessmen and entrepreneurs. For more information, click on my Intro section.